Do you get that sense at all? It feels a lot like that to me. — csalisbury

As I said, Derrida strikes me as impatient. Fine, it just means we have to read him less linearly. The best authors successively blow your mind in slow steps, with each step.

The Tractatus takes model theory for a fist order language and turns it into a spiritual exercise, or as a kind of ontology. It is disturbing in retrospect, but it has interesting connotations when you think about semanticists and logicians speaking of 'possible worlds,' and the way these are used model-theoretically to serve just whatever purpose the formal language requires of them.

A lot of these spiritual insights are now, unbeknownst to the people using them, mundanized; so the fact that 'the object is simple' is now simply to say that the domain of individuals is utterly independent from the world and from the properties borne. In the mid 20th century, this was super contentious and philosophers fretted about all sorts of weird paradoxes it caused (like every individual in the world being switched around with no empirical difference!). But now it's just a formal matter of course – a yearning spiritual question reduced to a formal tool. The rest of the Tractatus is the same (truth tables, and so on), the idea of the object containing all logical possibilities, logical space, etc.

Isn't the point that philosophy has some death issues, though, not Husserl in particular? I think the point about my death is that the realization that everything I can express about myself, and what I am, is from something handed down from the past and that can be iterated indefinitely into the future. I mean, the extremity of Husserl's position on time-consciousness relates any kind of past- or future-hood to death, removal from presence (although I'm not sure I buy Derrida's take on this).

I also think this sprinkling in of large themes has been characteristic of Derrida's style so far, but before some of it was in footnotes.

I'd like to make it clear that Derrida is not really psychoanalyzing Husserl's concerns with death. Husserl was mystified by personal birth, death, and sleep, and the ways he thinks about them are fascinating, especially in his late career. There is even a place where Husserl claims that the primal ego (which in late Husserl looks like it's even deeper than the 'sedimented' transcendental ego!!) is immortal. Now, you can make of this enigmatic comment what you will. But damn.

As for the death of all rational beings, well I don't know. Certainly I think there's a sense in which, Schopenhauer-like, Husserl thinks the world would be destroyed in such a case. He also seems to think the world could be destoryed while the people survive (!!)

I feel good about the allusions to death and so on. He is hitting on a crucial nerve. All this stuff about classical voluntarism, immortalism, body-soul distinctions, and so on is not just hot air. (also, I think the repeatability reveals my own death rather than occluding it).

I'm not really comfortable with the appeal to counterfactuality, because I think it will explode the thesis into triviality: talk of what could be repeated obscures important points about what it takes, empirically, for a sign to be part of a sign-system, and we could say for instance that a cloud could be a letter, and so on.

The point is that all that it takes for an indicative sign to function is to indicate once. So we're faced with a bit of a fork: either we admit it can be idiosyncratic, because counterfactually it would take a lot of strain to convert the indicator into an indicator for anyone else (and indeed, this will be more and more difficult the more we specify the specific act of indication, e.g. by specifying a time or circumstance under which it must occur in order to count as 'the same,' which is variable depending on what description of the indication you prefer), or in order to make it non-idiosyncratic we stretch the counterfactual conditions to such length that the could have clause becomes trivial, since anything 'could have' been anything in the widest possible sense. The semantics of counterfactuals are hard anyway, especially when it comes to things like signs that 'get essentialized.'

These aren't knock-down rebuttals, just concerns.

Also, just to make the scope of my concern clear, note that Derrida refers to 'absolute ideality.' The gulf between ideality and non-ideality is characteristic of structuralism. All I am saying is that ideality may be gradable, such that we could say something weaker like 'the less idiosyncrasy, the more ideality / the more signhood.'

“I am the one who is” is the confession of a mortal. Although it is not mentioned explicitly, I'm almost entirely sure this is an allusion to God's declaration to Moses in Exodus that "I am who I am". — StreetlightX

I thought this too. It can't be an accident. Also, the footnote following this is funny.

I am basically on board with Derrida with these motifs. I agree about the possibility of death and the tradition's aversion to it through perpetual self-actualization and presence and so on. I have little to say in trying to critique them because they strike me as deeply correct in some way, and at this point they're more allusions than arguments.

I'm going to be a little reductive here and point out that analytic and continental philosophers, around this time (50s and 60s) were both going through a violent backlash against mentalistic pictures of meaning, and especially linguistic meaning. However, the general line of attack curiously tended to go in opposite directions between the traditions.

The analytic philosopher (exemplified by Wittgenstein) says: the problem with language being idiosyncratic is that would mean it couldn't suffice for communication. But, communication is essential for language; so language can't be idiosyncratic.

The continental philosopher (exemplified by Derrida) says: the problem with language being without communication is that then it would be idiosyncratic. But, a lack of idiosyncrasy is essential for language: so language can't be non-communicative.

Now it doesn't take a genius to see that there's a sort of circle of related concepts going on here. If we are a Husserl who is not within this circle, then something else is going to have to convince us to step into it.

So let's think about the way a sign might be idiosyncratic. Well, we know even from Derrida that indicative signs that are non-linguistic are only so functionally, given the lived experience that animates them. This means that what something indicates to someone depends on the experiencer. If I see food missing from the pantry, it might indicate the local rat has been about again; but to everyone else, not knowing about the existence of this rat, this is no such indication at all. Within this limited scope, then, the sign is idiosyncratic. So does Derrida mean by 'sign' only a linguistic, or expressive sign? Is it only these that cannot be idiosyncratic (note the strength of his claim: a sign cannot be idiosyncratic, essentially). He must mean something like that. But then, why is it important for him to cordon off language in this way, given his general desire to collapse expression and indication?

If we were to move into only expressive or linguistic signs, then we might think about empirical phenomena that sit uncomfortably with both the analytic and continental pictures, including twin languages, self-directed speech, child nonsense words, studies involving experimental subjects who learn on language fragments containing nonce-words, ephemeral names like 'Mr. I Don't Know What Time It Is,' which only require one tokening to be understood, and may never be used in a speaker's life again afterward, and so on. We might also with Quine question to what extent the forceful leveling of our linguistic practice to something common and repeatable really removes all of the inner kinks of each individual, and to what extent language actually is idiosyncratic, but the idiosyncrasies are just washed out by the needs of communication (and so communication shaves off, can never really capture all the nuances of, expression). To do this would be to accuse Derrida of a kind of blindness: he sees the ideality and repeatability of the sign as essential precisely because for him as a structuralist, this is the only thing that counts as 'signage' to begin with, and in fact, to turn his method around on him, there is no essential separation between the repeatable and the idiosyncratic, but they shade into each other.

But before going there, we would have to know what the generality of Derrida's claim is supposed to be, and what he thinks of idiosyncratic indications. As it stands there is a discomfort here, and he seems to be doing something like what he's accusing Husserl of doing: trying to sequester indication away, once we're to talk about 'signs' (where Husserl's 'slips of the tongue' according to Derrida went in the opposite direction in saying, 'signs, namely indications').

---

I also wonder whether anyone would be interested in talking a little bit about the background involving Saussure. He was overtly mentioned last chapter, but this one seems to me to be where his influence is most obvious and crucial for getting at what's going on.

I'm not convinced that an idiosyncratic sign can't be a sign, and I think it shows some structuralist prejudices, which are plausible if we are sympathetic to Derrida to begin with, but won't be convincing.

In what sense are the possible phases "identical"? Is this an equality, in the sense that numerous possibilities could have equal probability? If we cannot apprehend all possible phases, how could we divide probability equally? — Metaphysician Undercover

There is no probability involved: the phases are perceived as noemata, but there is a kind of 'synthesis' that unites all of them to the same object, the same transcendent underlying object. There might even be cases where the difference between seeing two objects in virtue of seeing two phases, and seeing one, breaks down: suppose you're looking at a chair and it seems to 'blink' out of existence, for just a moment, then reappear. What happened? Did the 'same' chair come in and out of existence, and are you seeing two phases of it, or did one chair disappear and another coalesce? Here our positing intuitions break down, as can be seen in problems involving teleportation that people often discuss. Clearly we have robust but mysterious intuitions about which phenomenological conditions allow phases to be united in this way, and there are borderline cases.

What does the positing here, to make them appear as objects? It doesn't suffice to say that the words were at some time perceived as objects (the positing occurred at this time), then they were recollected in the imagination, because words are artificial, so we must account for them coming into existence, being created as objects, units of identity. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, the words are not being recollected, since memory is a memory of something real that has past (or rather, memory presents what is being remembered as real in the past). Imagination is different: it doesn't posit because in virtue of imagining something, you do not take it to exist. This raises interesting questions about the identity conditions of imagined objects, which are different from those of perceived objects: for example, can two people phantasy the same imaginary centaur, if there is no common fictional character or anything like that for them to latch onto? If I make up a centaur, does it really have any other phases that I could fulfill, by seeing its backside, etc.? Surely I can make them up in my imagination, but it doesn't seem as if, with a real horse, say, they were already there – and so there seems to be phases uniting the imaginary centaur, but only insofar as the activity of my imagination holds it together, and so I take there to be no transcendent underlying object, and I do not take any actual centaur to exist.

What Derrida says in Chapter 4 here, as I understand it, that this distinction cannot holds for linguistic signs, since to use a sign in the imagination fulfills all the same indicative functions that constitutes its real, actual existence in discourse.

The transcendent object isn't posited by the theorist – it's part of the structure of perception. When we perceive something, we perceive not only one side or phase of it, but it projects countless other sides or phases we know we could 'fulfill' by further perceptions (like walking around to the backside of a spatial object). But these projections are infinite and impossible to exhaust in principle, so the object confronts us as transcendent, a hidden 'X' behind all possible phases of it, we seeing those phases as identical, but knowing that no tallying up of them can possibly exhaust the object in experience. Thus the structure of perception itself posits this transcendent object, not 'we' the phenomenologists. All this is observed without 'believing' what perception tells us – we just note that perception is indeed 'positing' in this way, it takes there to be a real, transcendent object.

But the point about the words is that it takes place in imagination, which unlike with perception, does not involve a 'positing.'

A terminological point – transcendent would be for objects existing beyond experience, transcendental for the conditions of possible experience.

And part of the phenomenological method is explicitly bracketing credence in transcendent objects in order to study the experiential structures of positing those objects. So we see the outside from the inside: in perceiving a transcendent object we note the way in which the perception itself requires positing a transcendent thing, without actually believing there is any such thing.

Alright, nice. It seems like the stakes get successively higher with each section, though 6 and 7 are still beyond me ATM.

I will try to say a little something about the comments on Saussure too, but I don't know how much would be helpful. In the meantime, let me know if anyone else wants to take up summarizing Chapter 4.

Hey guys,

Sorry it's been a little tough keeping up the energy this week. I want to close out just by mentioning a couple things as promised about the series of distinctions Derrida mentions near the end of the chapter regarding Husserl and Saussure.

First, Husserl, or "what the fuck does 'non-reell' mean?"

Husserl was obsessed with the real versus the unreal, and with belief and the postponement of belief. The epoché, as a method of 'bracketing' the world and our natural attitudes toward it, was effectively a massive 'neutralization' of our ordinary credence in a sort of naïve metaphysical picture, which allows phenomenology to happen. As such, he drew many distinctions regarding reality and unreality, and belief thereof. Some clarification on what Derrida is on about with his two levels of unreality and so on may be helpful to some of the questions MU was posing earlier this week.

The first distinction that's important for Husserl here is the real versus the 'irreal,' a term Derrida also uses here. Reality in this first sense usually corresponds to the German Wirklichkeit or Realität, which means reality in a pretty unphilosophical sense: real stuff in the real world, things that have causal effects on one another, are concrete an manifest in space in time, and in short, partakers in efficient causation. Pretty much all of the talk Derrida goes into regarding ideality versus the empirical, mundane, accidental, etc. has to do with this distinction: so indication, for example, as something involving a really existent sign that motivates belief in something else that is really existent, owes its efficacy to its reality in this basic sense. On the other hand, we have things that are 'irreal,' that is, unworldly, ideal as opposed to empirical, not party to efficient causation, non-spacial, atemporal, and in short, Platonic. The bizarre neologism 'irreal' is meant to contrast with 'unreal;' these things are real, but have a different sort of reality from concrete stuff, in the way that the Platonic forms do. These would be things that we classically think of ideal, like mathematical objects, but also crucially for Husserl, things that are closer to what you might call Kantian forms of intuition, things that are a little bit more 'sensuous' despite having no existence, like the form of the color blue, for example.

Two important points for Husserl here: irreal things can still be perceived, in a quite literal sense: for Husserl, all cognition is ultimately due to perception, direct 'seeing' of something before the ego's gaze, whether ideal or concrete; and second, the real and irreal crucially depend on each other, in contrast to the more unidirectional instantiation-Form Platonic model. All irrealities are perceived via concrete existent things, and all concrete existent things are in turn only able to exist insofar as they fit the mold of abstract forms or essences. This is the basic phenomenological distinction between fact and eidos, and the basic phenomenological method for securing results, which secures perception of the eidos from some fact, is the aptly named eidetic reduction.

The second distinction is between things that are real as concrete or inherent pieces of consciousness versus things that are not constituted as part of consciousness, but outside of it. As Derrida mentions, things that are 'real' in this second sense include (1) hyle, (2) morphe, and (3) noesis. Hyle is sensory matter, the raw sensory 'stuff' out of which experiences are built, sort of like Humean impressions or the Kantian sensory manifold: hues, light, timbre, odor, and so on. Morphe is then shape or form, which imposes on the matter some shape, and allows the hyle to be seen as objects of one sort or another. For Husserl, there is no pure perception of hyle not molded to morphe, although the status of these two is left unclear ultimately. Finally, there is noesis, which is the act of consciousness itself, which 'animates' the hyle into its form: so noetic acts will include perceiving, wishing, wanting, believing, doubting, and so on.

Across the divide from noesis is the noema, which is the object of consciousness. It is important to remember that the nomeata need not exist in the ordinary sense of being 'real' as above. Thus, for example, we can imagine a centaur, and there is a noema there, qua imagined object: there is an 'imaginary centaur,' but no 'imagined centaur,' since of course there are no centaurs. Direction toward a nomea, therefore, does not require existence: Husserl distinguishes between the noema roughly as the 'sense' of the object, and the 'underlying X' which we take in ordinary realistic thinking to underly it, the existence of which the epoché brackets. Thus in doing phenomenology we see the nomea, the object-sense, which equates roughly to Brentano's 'intentionally in-existing object,' but we do this purely within experience, and do not take our experience to motivate a transcendent underlying X that the noema directs us to; instead we merely examine phenomenologically our positing such an X, i.e. in perception, even as we don't buy into this positing. A nomea is 'unreal' in this second sense, because unlike the hyle, morphe, and noesis, it is not an inherent or concrete part of consciousness: consciousness is directed at it, as something that is constituted outside of it (even though, in the usual phenomenological paradox Derrida mentioned last chapter, we examine this 'outside' from purely 'within' experience). It is this second sense of being 'unreal' that the unfortunate term non-reell is being used to describe (with the inherent parts of consciousness then being 'reell').

So in soliloquy, in speaking to ourselves, Husserl wants to maintain that we merely imagine the words, and that they are not real: so in what sense are they unreal? We have seen two ways in which this holds:

(1) The word itself is not real in the ordinary sense, and experience in no way claims that it is: it is only imaginary. Crucially, this is because imagination, unlike perception and memory, is what Husserl calls a 'non-positional' attitude: it does not motivate belief in or commitment to the existence of its object.

(2) As noema, the word is non-reell because it is not an inherent part of consciousness.

Finally, it bears mentioning that insofar as our goal is to express something by means of the word, we have a third kind of non-reality, or irreality:

(3) What is expressed is an ideal, as opposed to a concrete and actual, meaning. And so we see the word in its essence, not as a concrete thing being used to indicate concrete experiences or states of affairs to anyone.

Thanks a lot for this. Yeah, I was barely on the cusp of understanding that Derrida was referring to logographic scripts, and not some alternate writing technique. Man, this exchange is wild. Derrida's conclusions about the significance of all this seem too excited, as are the cultural comparisons (which reek of a weird Orientalism). But man, given what he was responding to, I can barely blame him – that Leibniz quote is wild. It's so indicative of the time period, but also so astoundingly naive: this episode on 'when a genius says stupid things.'

I do not think this exchange has ultimate bearing on what Husserl is saying, interesting as it is. The fact that alphabetic scripts encode phonological information that logographic scripts don't seems not to detract from the points about communication and indication: perhaps Derrida's mind was more solidly on the subject because of his Saussurean influence, since for Saussure the signifier is a sound-image, but as far as Husserl is concerned, I don't see how it makes a difference even in writing, since the crux is on communication and not any particular sensory vehicle that accomplishes it, so logograms do not get us 'closer' to pure expressivity in that sense. Additionally, the privileging of the spoken word makes all of this moot, since of course it's not as if Chinese has any less of a phonology than European languages for not encoding it in a script (and any European ideas that it might are totally ridiculous). A pedantic clarification here: it is the script that matters, not the language, since of course Chinese can be very easily written in alphabetic script, and often is, and while the reverse is not really done as a matter of common practice, nothing precludes it in principle.

"expressive discourse" (isn't the whole point that expression is precisely non-discursive?). — StreetlightX

Rather, that it doesn't include discourse essentially, not that it excludes it essentially, since communication is both indicative/discursive and expressive simultaneously.

"Justifications do explain choices, whether or not the agent actually goes through the process of reasoning following the justification. For it is a fact of human nature that we tend to act in ways justified by our beliefs and desires, even when we do not think through the justification."

- David Lewis

when i do this same experiment, it's very strange. I have all sorts of attendant dreamlike images. I have the same sort of linguistic breakdowns too. But the word itself is like a weird center (a kind of 'fire pit') all these things congregate around. It seems like language is what creates these firepits that allow my thoughts to coalesce. But they also flow into pre-established channels. The word itself seems somehow outside myself, its in the shared space beyond my hut, so to speak. — csalisbury

Have you ever made up a word before, with a gerrymandered meaning that would be difficult to get beyond the inner sphere of expression into communication? One reason I've always been skeptical of OLP-oriented criticisms of private meanings is that even as a child, before ever hearing any of these arguments, I had seemed to have done exactly what these philosophers were telling me I could not do, and I just assumed everyone else had, too. The word is no less potent for my private musings for the fact that I'd have a hard time explaining it. Some of them in fact ended up having real words that I understood immediately to be what I had been thinking of all along. "Virtue signaling" is one such case – I had always known on a very fundamental level what virtue signaling was, but had never thought to communicate the notion. I don't think I ever attached a phonological form to the notion, but I had a sort of 'private word' for it all along.

Would this be possible without a deep immersion in the english language? — csalisbury

Obviously not, but we need to stay on guard against the fallacy that Kant warns against in the very first sentences of the CPR.

There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience. For how should our faculty of knowledge be awakened into action did not objects affecting our senses partly of themselves produce representations, partly arouse the activity of our understanding to compare these representations, and, by combining or separating them, work up the raw material of the sensible impressions into that knowledge of objects which is entitled experience? In the order of time, therefore, we have no knowledge antecedent to experience, and with experience all our knowledge begins.

But though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience. For it may well be that even our empirical knowledge is made up of what we receive through impressions and of what our own faculty of knowledge (sensible impressions serving merely as the occasion) supplies from itself. If our faculty of knowledge makes any such addition, it may be that we are not in a position to distinguish it from the raw material, until with long practice of attention we have become skilled in separating it. This, then, is a question which at least calls for closer examination, and does not allow of any off-hand answer: -- whether there is any knowledge that is thus independent of experience and even of all impressions of the senses. Such knowledge is entitled a priori, and distinguished from the empirical, which has its sources a posteriori, that is, in experience.

Certainly Husserl is aware that one has to be exposed to empirical light in order to see – but it would be a bad misreading of Husserl to suppose that this fact threatened the possibility of eidetic analyses of visual phenomena.

Do this, though, as an experiment - imagine the word 'contemplation' and extract the semantic essence from it. And attend closely to how this plays out. It's really not clear what's going on, at least when I try to do it. — csalisbury

Here are some things I can pull out rather quickly:

-Contemplation is an activity that something can partake in.

-Contemplation is not something an inanimate object can take part in. It requires animacy at the very least, and probably intelligence at least comparable to that of a human at least of a certain stage of cognitive development.

-Contemplation is deliberate, and cannot be done involuntarily or un/subconsciously.

-As opposed to thought generally, it is unhurried. In at least its most canonical forms, it is also penetrating, revealing all accessible aspects of something.

-Contemplation is telic: it aims at something contemplated, and seeks to discover something about it, and in particular something having to do with its structure that can't be gleaned from a superficial observation of it. The results of contemplation are intended to be consciously understood if successful.

How do I know all of these things?

So, I think I disagree about the centrality of soliloquy to Husserl's thought generally. Husserl has a certain tenor to his work, and that tenor certainly includes a belief in an absolute withdrawal into the self and a sometimes shocking sense of solitude and metaphysical loneliness. It's part of his reduction to the sphere of ownness, his detour through solipsism in the Fifth Meditation, his obsession with Augustine and his comments about 'the inner man,' the belief in the transcendental ego constituting all cultural sedimentations, his adoption of the Leibnizian notion of the 'monad,' his accusation that other philosophers are 'afraid' to go down the hole into the origin of origins in the 'Ur-ich,' the primal solipsism, for fear they cannot make it back out, and so on. I do not think Derrida is being tone-deaf here, even if at this initial stage he takes himself to be psychoanalyzing something that Husserl has ;let slip' at the beginning of the Investigations.

It is important to remember that all transcendental thinkers flirt with solipsism, and I think this is not an accident: Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer are prime examples, and I think a certain solipsism can be read into, even follows from, Kant himself. Husserl clearly thinks at some level that we can communicate completely alone, and the notion that presence as Husserl conceives of it has not only to do with being in the present, but also alone, is on point.

I don't really understand what Husserl is saying. If we already understand immediately what we're saying to ourselves, what's going on with these interpolated (and yes, inherited) signs? Why are they there? Why is the immediacy of meaning taking a superfluous detour through a self-dissolving mediator? — csalisbury

Husserl does admit that the point of using language is to communicate: that we can talk to ourselves doesn't mean that it's often a useful exercise, except in his little faux-examples, where one addresses oneself as 'you.' It's still phenomenologically important, though, because we can extract the essence of, say, the semantics of a word, or the semantics of it relative to a certain intention.

Personally I think self-directed speech is important, and psychologists generally have been very interested in it, because we can indicate things to ourselves or communicate to ourselves. But I don't find Husserl's notion that there's a layer of sense and experience that has no need for indication at all implausible. In fact it seems to me the vast majority of my experience goes on like this without communicative comment. Crispin Sartwell has a great comment to this effect as well, that even trying to imagine what it would be like to have a running commentary on all your experience, or to think that all experience is linguistically mediated, is just totally absurd and impossible. Generally philosophers overrate language because they spend a lot of time talking and reading: I think Derrida is one of them (and he strikes me as someone who likes the sound of his own philosophical voice as well, and deeply fears, just as much as Husserl fears death, that someone will force him, or the tradition he's a part of, to shut up), but that doesn't necessarily make his criticisms of Husserl off point.

I pretty much disagree with everything, so it doesn't matter to me. I read mostly to become familiar with the tradition.

Hot fire.

Double major in a hard science.

There is a passage concerning this on page 35, what makes a word recognizable as the same word, "...the sameness of the word is ideal." "It is the ideal possibility of repetition...". Further, he says that Husserl says, that what we are to receive as an indication must be perceived as an existent, but "the unity of a word owes nothing to its existence". By "unity", I assume he is referring to this sameness. That each occurrence is of "the same" word, creates a unity of those occurrences, or, it is "the same" word by virtue of this unity. Thus expression is a "pure unity". I assume that each occurrence of the word, in the imagination, is the same, as it has no physical properties to make a difference — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah, or the word has an essence as a sign: an essential sound-form, an essential syntactic role, and an essential semantic role. We can then put the latter to use in expressing what we mean, independent of the fact that any occurrence of the word exists. Like anything else, what makes it the 'same' word is that it fits beneath the essence of all the other instantiations. Derrida seems to object that a word's essential features and its features in actual use are one and the same.

What I was saying is not that writing comes along as a representation of speech. I think writing and speech came about separately, in parallel, for different reasons. At first, there wo that we would today classify as art, should really be classified more as written language, memory aids. Consider artificial landmarks, direction indicators and such things as memory aids. It was when these two forms of language, communicative, and memoric, merged, when it was learned that oral sounds could be remembered through representation with writing, that the evolution of language exploded. A symbol could represent an artificial sound, and this would enable the memory of that sound, and how to make that sound. The writing down of the symbol enables the memory, which ensures the unity, or sameness which is referred to above. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't know how much this matters, but there's nothing essential about writing it seems to me that services memory more than sound: it just so happens that the materials we had lying around were better for inscribing visual marks than sound waves, which changed once phonograph cylinders were invented. It might have been otherwise. Also, sound forms were themselves used as mnemonic devices in epic poetry long before the stories were written down, and sometimes remembering a pattern in verse is even more effective than searching a text. In any case I do not think language as a mnemonic device is crucial for Husserl once we separate imagination from memory (also, I don't think Husserl would want to claim a word's unity comes along with writing – surely he wants to attribute the same unity to languages spoken in pre-literate societies, and words can have unity, as I said, via their phonological, semantic, etc. functions). It seems like it might become important for Derrida, who seems to be going in the direction of claiming that any use of a sign brings with it a 'memory' of a different sort, of its institutional uses and place in a symbolic system, which will be preserved equally in imagination and ordinary communicative use.

Yes, my point was just that this lack of motivation is easier to see with a centaur, since there is no temptation to think imagining a centaur motivates any existence. It holds equally true for the imagination of things, instances of which actually exist.

How is the "existence" of those words on the piece of paper fundamentally different from the "existence" of those words in my memory, such that on the paper the words exist, but in my memory they are non-existent? — Metaphysician Undercover

A couple things – first, memory and imagination are very different for Husserl. Husserl does think that memory is 'positional' just like perception is: it also presents the remembered thing as existent (in the past). My guess is that when we imagine a word to ourselves in silent speech, we are typically not remembering some past actual instance of that word spoken or inscribed. Though of course we can, in which case the actual past existence of that word may motivate any number of things, and so serve as an indicator.

Second, it looks like in the next chapter Derrida will ask this question and come to the conclusion that there really is no difference between phantasied and actually used language. It may be possible you are sympathetic to his argument, but I'm not sure because I don't understand the fourth chapter very well yet.

I think it is important to respect a fundamental difference between written language and spoken language. I believe that there is such a fundamental difference, and that it is based in a difference of intention behind these two types of language. Spoken language is intended principally, as communication between individuals. Written language is intended principally, as a memory aid. I write things down so that I can refer to them and remember them at a later time. So with respect to "the solitary life of the soul", we should really pay special attention to the written word, rather than the spoken word. — Metaphysician Undercover

Derrida will claim, AFAIK, that this is basically how western philosophy has always treated writing v. speech, although I don't know if he goes over it in this book. That is, speech is primary, used to express communicative intentions, and then writing comes along as a representation of speech. It seems like Husserl would be sympathetic to this, although perhaps writing itself isn't so important as the communicative immediacy, which is just typically higher in speech than writing (a recorded message on an answering machine, for example, while technically 'speech,' would seem less immediate than an instant message sent to an attentive audience, which is technically 'writing' – so what matters is not the sensory modality, but the use it's put to, and the degree to which it's 'symbolic,' 'recorded,' 'repeatable,' etc.). Husserl seems to want to get rid of any sort of use of actually existent symbols, to get rid of communication, though I'm not sure if writing used merely as a mnemonic aid would trouble him, since it would indicate the expression desired, but then the expression itself, once gotten ahold of, could be seen in its own right. Though maybe I am being flippant here. It looks like Derrida will ultimately argue that the 'repetition' of writing is in fact in no way secondary to the original 'production' of intended meaning, since the latter relies on the former in alway employing pre-understood symbols (that is the best I can make of it in this early stage).

There is a footnote on writing by Derrida on p. 23, at the beginning of chapter 2, though honestly I haven't quite figured out what's going on in it yet, and some of the vocabulary is opaque to me.

So the question is, how is the psychical act of imaging the words, as a mediation, fundamentally different from the psychical act of hearing the words. as a mediation, such that one is indicative, and the other is not? — Metaphysician Undercover

Derrida talks a little about this on pp. 37-38.

But why is Husserl not satisfied by the difference between the existing (perceived) word and the perception or the perceived being, the phenomenon of the word? It is because in the phenomenon of perception, a reference is located in phenomenality itself to the existence of the word. The sense "existence" belongs then to the phenomenon. This is no longer the case with imagination. In imagination, the existence of the word is not implied, not even by means of the intentional sense.

Perception differes from imagination as an intentional act in that the former takes its object to be existent, even just within the experience of perception itself. To perceive something existent is a redundancy (we can then have beliefs regarding the perception that neutralize this belief, when we choose not to 'trust our senses,' or simply bracket this belief, as we do in the epoché, but the sense of existence remains in the experience itself, even if at a higher level we choose not to make use of this in theorizing).

Hearing the words is a kind of perception, which implies the existence of the heard word (to hear something, there has to be a sound). Indication requires that something existent give us motivation to believe in the existence of something else. With imagination, then, we have no existent thing to serve as motivation, nor is there any other existent thing that we take to be motivated by the imagination. The imaginary centaur not only doesn't exist, but it points to nothing else existent and motivates no new belief about existent things on our part. This is unlike with hearing someone else communicate with speech, where we perceive an existent word and this indicates an existent psychological state of some kind.

However, there is a second phase of removal described. This is the removal of the act of imagination from the thing which is imagined, in this case, the word. Following this there is a third phase suggested, and that is a removal of the contents of the act of imagination, the noema, from the act of imagination. Now it is implied, if not explicitly stated, that the contents of the act of imagination, the noema, is not actually the imagined words. If this is the case, then I believe that Husserl's claim that the imagined word is a form of pure expression, cannot be upheld. The act of imagination forms a mediation between the imagined word, and the content, or noema (this could be 'the concept') , and therefore I believe we have indication. In other words, the imagined words are not properly "the content" of the act of imagination, they are in some sense a manifestation, or indication of the actual content. — Metaphysician Undercover

This has to do with what I mentioned with regard to Husserl's many arcane distinctions about what is real and not real, and the distinction between noesis (act of consciousness) and noema (object of consciousness). I will try to talk more about this later when I have time, but for now I think I should say, that the noema need not point to, or motivate belief in, any really existent thing.

It's easier to see this if we use an example of something we take to be purely imaginary, like Husserl's own example of the centaurs. If we imagine a centaur, there is the act of imagination, and its object, its noema, which is the imaginary centaur. According to Husserl, there is still an object of imagination, even if there is no centaur (this is a holdover from Brentano, the 'inexisting intentional object'). Furthermore, we do not take there to be any centaur, nor do we feel that the imagination of a centaur motivates the existence of any centaur. The same is true for anything, including a word. The act of imagination itself suffices to see the expressive essence of the word – just as, I might add, we can see the essence of a centaur from imagining it, even though there are none, nor do we take there to be any!

So to be a little obtuse we can speak of 'the imaginary word' versus 'the imagined word.' The former exists qua intentional object, but the latter not only doesn't exist, we don't even take it to. It's not like because we talk to ourselves we suddenly think some real word somewhere has been actually uttered, and we're thinking about that. Likewise with centaurs, there is 'the imaginary centaur,' but there is no centaur, period, the centaur is the imagined object, but there are none, so the imagined object doesn't exist.

Importantly the notion of imagination that Husserl is appealing to is that of 'phantasy,' which is sort of like a plain old fantasy: it's not the kind of imagination where we e.g. imagine what someone else is doing right now, in hopes we are imagining correctly. Sometimes we say 'imagine' to mean something roughly like 'think,' but this is not what Husserl has in mind here.

Here’s a summary for Chapter 3.

In this chapter, Derrida is concerned with tracing Husserl’s move toward the ‘solitary life of the soul’ in Chapter 1: he expounds further on Husserl’s notion of expression and the steps that must be taken to isolate it from indication, and shows the way in which this requires an imaginative speech to oneself, in order to purge language of its communicative (indicative) elements. There is also a footnote in this chapter that lays out the course of the entire work in extreme brief.

—

The first thing to note about expression is that, like its prefix ex- implies, it’s a movement outward. From what, and toward what? First there is something a thinker experiences, in a pre-linguistic substratum of experience, which takes the form of some intentionality: there is an act and an object, and so the act reaches ‘toward’ the object (perceiving the sky, imagining a centaur, etc.). Once the meaning (in Husserl’s wider sense of Sinn, sense) is present, expression can then supervene on this and move it ‘outward’ again, by ‘reflecting’ or ‘mirroring’ the intentional object (the noema) in a linguistic expression of what is experienced. In effect, the experiencer comes to ‘say’ exactly what he ‘sees.’ In this way all pre-linguistic experience tends toward being expressed: it is there for the expressing, and giving it a linguistic sense in a way only reduplicates what was already there. Importantly, all of this takes place within experience, and does not involve the positing of or exiting toward an outer world transcending experience.

Second, expression is purely voluntary. Here Derrida’s translation of Bedeutung as vouloir-dire comes into play: expression must be intentional in the non-technical sense, it must be done on purpose by the thinker. This means that any accompaniment of expression that its non-essential to this intentional redoubling of sense has to be excluded, and this includes any communicative features carried along with the expression by accident (here facial features and gestures are mentioned, though presumably the form of the un-intentionality doesn’t matter, and presumably also these gestures can be voluntary as well). These things can merely accidentally indicate the sense that the speaker wants to express, and while other people can pick up on these indications and infer what the speaker thinks from them, they only do this insofar as they themselves express something with regards to the involuntary acts, intentionally; otherwise, the smile indicating happiness is much like smoke indicating fire, strictly speaking not meant. Expression has to be purged of all such indicative impurities. Derrida makes two accusations of Husserl at this point – first, that Husserl is reinstituting a kind of voluntaristic metaphysics, since all experience seems to ‘tend toward’ a voluntary reduplication of it, while passivity (i.e. indication) is set to the side as secondary, and second, that this sort of move represents a deep fear of death and lack of presence (and lack of control) that Husserl’s metaphysics of presence is trying to resolve, by keeping the willed and present front and center.

In this connection Derrida notes there is a sort of mind-body split, reborn in the split between the intentional and the accidental, which is involved in the way Husserl holds that all physical expression of a sign contaminates its expressive capacity with indicative elements. When listening, to someone, we must attend to the physical side of a sign, and from it perceive mediately the sense expressed. Communicative speech thus requires mediation through physical objects that indicate one another: we can see another’s feelings and emotions, but not purely intuitively or originarily by nature, we only originarily see the physical signs through which they’re conveyed. Although expression is therefore generally intended to be used in communication, communication itself paradoxically destroys expression in its most basic form. For that, we need a lack of indicative mediation, which means a lack of mediation through physical signs, which means a lack of mediation through other people: we essentially have to talk to ourselves.

In talking to ourselves, Husserl thinks, we are indifferent to the actual existence of any word, and only need to imagine the word being used. Furthermore, we indicatively communicate nothing to ourselves, since our meaning is already intuitively present in our own experience. In soliloquizing, the word, as ideal linguistic object, still has all of the same meaning it has when we employ it in actual acts of communication, and actual speech only exteriorizes this to intertwine it with an indicative function. Therefore it doesn’t matter if we actually speak or not, and therefore indication is absent in talking to ourselves because indication relies on the reality of the indicator to motivate conviction in the indicated. But here we have merely imagined words, not words themselves, and we are indifferent to whether anything indicator or indicated exists at all.

—

There are two other explanatorily important things I think should be discussed at some point about this chapter: first, that monster footnote on pp. 38-39 (which maybe has as much content as the rest of the chapter combined), and second, the technical jargon surrounding Husserl and Saussure that Derrida alludes to at the end, regarding the reality of objects.

David Lewis - Convention: A Philosophical Study

I sort of want to read all of Lewis' stuff, if only to see how one so sensible could have gone so mad.

OK, in time for the start of the third chapter tomorrow, I have some puzzling sentences and what I have been able to make of them.

Indication falls outside the content of absolutely ideal objectivity, that is, outside the truth.

It seems that here Derrida is not accusing Husserl of disavowing empirical truth generally, but rather using 'truth' to mean the sort of truth provided by 'absolutely ideal objectivity.' I think this is fair, since reading the First Investigation, Husserl at least once does this himself, saying that an object perceived only mediately but not intuitively given (like someone else's mind), and so indicated, has 'no truth in it.' What Derrida seems to mean then is that indication can never provide for 'truth' in this especial sense.

Here again, this exteriority, or rather this extrinsic characteristic of indication, is inseparable, in its possibility, from the possibility of all the reductions to come, whether they are eidetic or transcendental.

I'm still not sure what to make of this one. For one thing, the 'here again' seems to suggest that Derrida has made this point before, or given some justification for it; but I can't find anything to that effect. Grammatically, it's a little confusing what's being literally said here: is it that the reductions cannot be performed without making use of indication? Or is it that indication cannot happen without the reduction? Presumably the former is more in keeping with the tone of the text. But then I do not know why this is so.

Having its "origin" in the phenomena of association and always connecting empirical existents in the world, indicative signification will cover, in language, all of what falls under the blows of the "reductions": factuality, mundane existence, essential non-necessity, non-evidence, etc.

The idea that mundane existence "falls under the blows of the reductions" seems misleading. In introducing the epoché, Husserl is careful to explain that there is no particular phenomenon or set of phenomena that it cordons off, nor is the idea to shave off an empirical layer of the world to reach its non-empirical substrate. After reduction, the world faces us just as it was, empirical existents and indications and all, but just as world-phenomenon. The difference is not one of content, but of attitude, the exchanging of the natural attitude for the phenomenological. So we should expect, for instance, that within the reduction we will still undergo motivation via indication, and further that these indicative motivations will themselves be material for phenomenology. This is underscored by the fact that Husserl himself attempts to provide an essential analysis for indication (which would, according to his method, have to operate via eidetic reduction on particular cases of indication). So we should not be misled into thinking that the point of the reduction is to 'get rid of indication,' and therefore that any sign it might be 'seeping in' is a sign that the reduction has failed on Husserl's terms.

Do we not already have the right to say that the entire future problematic of the reduction and all the conceptual differences in which they are declared (fact/essence, transcendentality/mundanity, and all the oppositions that are systematic with them) are developed in a hiatus between two types of signs?

Here is sort of the clincher, and the most confusing part of the chapter. Why do indication and expression map onto these two sides of the dichotomy? And why should we see this linguistic difference as having consequences for all of phenomenology?

Going off of what csalisbury has said, I wonder if we should take the bolded words here more seriously. Maybe Derrida is being quite literal when he asks about the differences in which they are declared? As in, phenomenological results, in order not only to be communicated among phenomenologists, not only to be written down and stored, but to be conducted to begin with, must be encoded within the language of the phenomenologist? When we want to express phenomenological insights or formulate them, if indication is bound up with expression, then all phenomenological method will be indicative as well, and therefore purely eidetic results will be impossible, because we cannot coherently mean them, at least not in the way Husserl wants, not purely apodictically and securely in evident intuition. We would depend, for the security of these expressed results, on a gap or lack of expression coming from empirically recalling or representing what is absent. This is how we 'develop' the theory.

I went back (forward?) to the Introduction, and some support for this view seems to come from the following comment on p. 7:

And, as Fink has indeed shown, Husserl never posed the question of the transcendental logos, of the inherited language in which phenomenology produces and exhibits the results of the workings of the reduction.

Perhaps what is at stake here is not the reduction itself, but any efficacy it has in reporting its results. I suspect for Derrida that these two things turn out to be inseparable – if we can't secure phenomenological results, then tho that extent there really is no reduction the way Husserl wants for there to be one. This in turn seems to be based on the following gambit: knowledge is not properly knowledge unless it can be recorded and communicated linguistically, and Husserl's notion that there is a pre-linguistic stratum of experience is a fantasy. Husserl would hold, I imagine, that it is possible to conduct eidetic analyses intuitively, without needing to record them linguistically, and the fact that we must resort to language to communicate them is a mere accident (one that could perhaps be bypassed if we were a certain sort of intuitive mind-reader?) This can work to make Derrida read as someone throwing in his gambit against Husserl's, but not yet, so far as I can see, as someone deconstructing Husserl from the inside or even producing a convincing thesis counter to him. It seems like we can't trust Derrida in making these claims until we know beforehand how crucial language is to the enterprise.

Am I crazy or does this guy just not get it?

Youtube URLs can go betweentags

How much more obvious can you make it that you're not a feminist? Why even use the term?

Again, no you can't have an experience of your own experience during which you'd be unable to tell whether it is what you think it is. — jkop

I never asked whether you can have 'an experience of your own experience.' Read the question again.

But it was not the blur of my own experience that I experienced, so the question whether the blur is what I think it is does not apply. — jkop

It doesn't matter. You were unable to decide, on the basis of an experience you had, whether you heard what you thought you heard. Whether you can 'experince your own experience,' or anything to that effect, is beside the point.

I had yet to wake up, but when I was awake the "problem" of whether I was answering the phone or dreaming was quickly resolved (unlike your alleged problem which is basically insurmountable). — jkop

Again, you don't know this, because you don't antecedently know whether for any given experience, you are perceiving (seeing, hearing, etc.) what you claim to be or think you are.

You are continually trying to attribute to me the position that you must assume some notion of representation or sense data; but you are simply wrong about this. Your problems persist regardless of whether this intermediary layer does, and so the issues with perception and the dreaming argument are independent of the type of realism you adopt. It is a realist problem, not an indirect realist problem, and direct realism does not help you in principle in resolving it. This is so as long as you admit the possibility of ever being perceptually mistaken about anything.

Is it possible that you can have an experience, during which you are unable to tell whether you see what you think you see or not?

fucking amazing!

True but I feel that while play always eventually gets boring, seriousness can suck you in and become increasingly enrapturing. And at the end of the day I want Husserls building the planes.